By Stephen Davis
Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 Vols.
ou might as well whistle “Old Dan Tucker” to a hurricane (to use the vernacular of the old time) as to write about the Army of Northern Virginia without consulting Lee’s Lieutenants.1
It’s not too much to say that its author, Douglas Southall Freeman, was born in 1886 to write such a book. A Virginian, Freeman was raised and educated in Richmond; his father was a Confederate veteran. After graduation from Richmond College in 1904, Freeman took his Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins. Unable to get a college teaching job, he joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1909. In 1915, at age 29, Freeman became editor of the Richmond News-Leader, a position he held for 34 years until his retirement in 1949.2
Freeman’s journalistic vocation, however, could not cloak his passion for Confederate history. He edited Lee’s Dispatches to Jefferson Davis, 1862–1865 (1915) and wrote the definitive (yes, definitive) four-volume biography of Lee (published 1934-35), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.3 Then he topped it all off with Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (three volumes, 1942, 1943, and 1944).4 The work was immediately popular. A reviewer in TIME asserted that “Dr. Freeman has written some of the most lucid accounts of military history in U.S. literature.” A critique in the New York Times Book Review hailed Volume Three of Lee’s Lieutenants as “one of the greatest individual achievements in the field of military biography.” Stephen Vincent Benet, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Brown’s Body (1928), praised Dr. Freeman’s talent for describing his soldiers as “figures in a great fresco, sharply drawn, superbly characterized.” Another reviewer applauded Freeman’s ability to depict Lee’s officers as human; “they have their temperaments, jealousies.”5
Freeman rounded out his stellar career with a six-volume study of George Washington, published 1948-54, the last number of which appeared after his death from a heart attack on June 13, 1953.6
With its first volume appearing just months after America’s entry into World War II, Lee’s Lieutenants attracted the readership of U.S. military officers. Eisenhower, Nimitz, McArthur, Patton, Bradley—all read Freeman’s work and praised it. General Bradley read sections of it before D-Day; Admiral Nimitz read Lee’s Lieutenants a half-hour every night.7
